The CBE Scroll

The ‘priesthood of all believers doctrine’ is well stated on the Southern Baptist Convention’s website: “We affirm the priesthood of all believers. Laypersons have the same right as ordained ministers to communicate with God, interpret Scripture, and minister in Christ’s name. That is why the Convention requires strong lay involvement on its boards. This doctrine is first and foremost a matter of responsibility and servanthood, not privilege and license.” (http://www.sbc.net/aboutus/pspriesthood.asp)

 The clearest Scriptural statement about this is in I Peter 2: 5,9 “…you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. …But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (NIV)

To me, this doctrine teaches that Christian women are priests. If they are priests, why can’t they preach? I suggest that women in the ministry fulfils the doctrine. Ministers “declare the praises of him,” as do all true Christians. Paul talks about specific gifts people have, and so specific people have specific tasks in the church, but this priesthood is not a gift, it is a calling given to all Christians. To say that a priest cannot fulfill a leadership function because of gender says to me that the “priesthood of all believers”  is only completely given to men, which seems to pervert Peter’s teaching here.

Does my interpretation make sense? I am not a Biblical languages scholar. Does the “declare” in I Peter indicate the ability to preach? The word is exaggello (Strong’s #1804), the base word of which means messenger or angel (Strong’s #32That seems to me to cover preaching.  I’m aware of at least one denomination that disagrees with my interpretation.

What do other denominations teach concerning this doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and women in the ministry? I’d love to know.

Does anyone have any other verses that give strong direction concerning this that they would like to share?

I’m looking forward to hearing from you all.

I was shocked. I remembered the old Bryan*, the Bryan that put on the brakes during a discussion of Large Group speakers at our Coordinating Team planning retreat. “Why is it suddenly illegal to bring in white men?” he asked, frustrated. As Multi-Ethnicity Team Leader on our exec, I was pushing hard for more female and ethnic minority speakers during our weekly InterVarsity chapter meetings. Some of the other C-Team members were fairly supportive; Bryan was making it an uphill battle.

How did that same Bryan end up sitting next to me on a flight home to North Carolina, rattling on excitedly about speaker Brenda Salter-McNeill and other highlights of Urbana 06? I had noticed how carefully InterVarsity had crafted its triennial missions conference, putting women in the pulpit and using the gender-accurate TNIV, among other things. Nevertheless, I hadn’t imagined its potential effect on Bryan’s support for women in ministry. But he could not deny the voice of the Holy Spirit through these female speakers—who was he to silence God?

As I prepare to graduate, I realize the stark contrast between InterVarsity and much of the evangelical world—my female friends and I will no longer find widespread acceptance as leaders. However, regardless of our personal beliefs, when women are suddenly barred from such roles, we might actually miss them. Women like me have had invaluable experience leading in mission on campus, and men like Bryan have served alongside women, being blessed by their leadership.

Across a fairly wide spectrum of parachurch organizations, opportunities abound for the reconsideration of limiting views of women. Women lead in many mainstream evangelical ministries, large and small, and God’s work through them is not unnoticed. Christianity Today features articles by authors like Lauren Winner, and Joan Mussa and Julie Regnier serve as Senior Vice Presidents for World Vision. Women even teach future pastors at Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Trinity, three of the largest non-denominational evangelical seminaries. A female student leader from Campus Crusade organized UNC’s 24/7 Prayer week this year, and countless other local ministries depend on the time, vision, skills, and prayers of women who love Jesus. While varying in their official positions on women in ministry, each of these more missionally driven organizations senses a practical need for women’s participation.

Yes, it may seem contradictory at first: despite affirming women in their specific ministries, many parachurch organizations like InterVarsity remain silent about female deacons, elders, and pastors/priests in the local church. (Some organizations would say they oppose it, in fact!) I myself used to feel abandoned by this silence, but now I celebrate it. While I question the validity of this sharp church/parachurch distinction and would appreciate InterVarsity’s eventual allegiance to CBE’s egalitarian cause, I have begun to rejoice in the quietly strategic—even inadvertent—role of other parachurch organizations in advancing gender reconciliation and justice.

Especially among university students and other young adults, the parachurch, with its focused yet flexible structures, is often uniquely suited to interact with diverse constituencies otherwise lacking exposure to women in ministry. Indeed, perhaps one of the most significant things we can do to support gender equality is to remain invested in the parachurch organizations that are already informally, sometimes accidentally, changing minds and hearts about women. Regardless of what is or isn’t said about the issue, the mere presence of women in leadership transforms lives. By donating to humanitarian organizations, encouraging college-bound high schoolers to join a campus ministry, volunteering at a local level, or simply connecting others to a female author who has mentored us from a distance, we may be doing more than we realize to advance women’s ministry. Of course, I look forward to finding clearer allies to CBE’s mission. But I’m excited to see the Lord is already at work, sometimes in the places I least expect.

(Adapted from a paper given at the 2007 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society)

My interest in women and missions of the 1800s is reinvigorated, of late, by a number of experiences I’ve had lecturing at Christian colleges and seminaries around the county. When invited to speak for chapel services, I make an effort to learn something about the school, particularly the achievements of the founders and their graduates. In doing so, I have discovered the vast number of women alumni, who were also leaders on the mission field in the United States and abroad. And, they had the full support of the school’s founders. As I include these findings when I lecture, I am often surprised at the responses I receive… some of these Christian colleges appear almost embarrassed to learn of the number of women who held positions of significant leadership and who were trained in this capacity by their institution.

Most of our evangelical colleges and seminaries initially began as Bible institutes - and nearly all Bible institutes had many more women enrolled than men. Why? Because Christians in the 1800s, influenced by premillenialism, believed that Christ’s return was imminent - and therefore, they were far more concerned about the Great Commission than they were with gender or ethnicity. As a result of placing less emphasis on gender, women outnumbered men on the mission field, two to one. This led to one of the largest expanses of Christian faith in history - during what has been called the ‘Golden Era of Missions’ - which began in the early 1800s, in which women were the driving force.

Bible institutes trained men and women for evangelism, in anticipation of Christ’s immediate return. Over time, these institutes became today’s Christians colleges and universities which broadened their curriculum to prepare Christian men and women for professional service in many disciplines. In doing so, some lost touch with their evangelical moorings as it relates to women’s gospel-leadership.

As I celebrate the legacy of their female graduates who preached to men and women all over the world, I am frequently asked two questions:

1. If women were the driving force behind the Golden Era of Missions, what took the church so long to use women in this capacity?

2. What has happened since then? Why has their leadership been lost, and where are women gospel leaders today?

First off, it was during the Golden Era of Missions, with the enormous success God granted the gifts he had given women and slaves that Christians began to question the presumed ontological inferiority of both women and slaves. They did so from a thorough examination of Scripture. Their biblical research was published in more than forty-six biblical treatises between 1808 and 1930, from many branches of the evangelical church, in support of the shared leadership of women. These documents signified the emergence of the first wave of feminists - a deeply biblical movement. The advancement of women’s ontological and functional equality grew out of a commitment to biblical authority, evangelism, and an activism that came to characterize or identify the evangelical movement as a whole, beginning in the 1800s. And, it was the early evangelicals - both men and women, who were among the first to provide both a biblical and social voice for gender and ethnic equality. By doing so, they represented a radical departure from previous generations of Christians whose patriarchal and racist assumptions went unchallenged by Scripture.

Biblicists (those who affirmed the supremacy of Scripture), were early evangelicals who supported the evangelism of women and in doing so they not only challenged higher critical methods that undermined the authority of the Bible, they also resisted the ‘proof text’ method or plain reading of Scripture that gave support not only to slavery, but also to women’s exclusion from public ministry. Rather, evangelical biblicists sought to harmonize those passages that appeared in conflict with the whole of Scripture regarding the equal value (ontology) and service (function) of women and slaves. Thus, the first-wave feminists developed a whole-Bible hermeneutic that addressed gender and ethnic justice and advanced an ontological equality for women and slaves.

This comes to the second question - why Christian colleges (formerly Bible institutes) appear unfamiliar with the legacy of their earliest women students (who outnumbered male students two to one)… The truncation of women students in Bible institutes and leadership was the result of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Simply stated, modernists challenged both the inspiration of Scripture and the very miracles of Scripture and created uncertainty surrounding the fundamentals of the Christian faith, like the Virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ. They did so using higher critical methods. In response, some Bible institutes, wishing not to appear sympathetic with Modernists, reshaped their curriculum, omitting classes in Greek and Hebrew, and leaning towards the ‘plain reading of the texts.’ This opened the way to a plain reading of 1 Timothy in isolation to the other places in the New Testament where Paul clearly affirms the authority and leadership of women like Junia, Priscilla, Phoebe, Chloe, etc. Thus, the gains made both biblical and socially by the early evangelicals were stymied and linked to a liberal reading of Scripture. Christians for Biblical Equality has had to pick up the biblical scholarship left off by early evangelicals like A.J. Gordon, Katharine Bushnell, Frances Willard and Catherine Booth. Thankfully, the work begun by the early evangelicals has grown so quickly in the last twenty years that CBE is having a difficult time keeping track of the many Christian groups around the world exploring biblical equality both from a popular and scholarly viewpoint.

Thanks to John for pointing out a recent poll in Christianity Today that asked the question ‘Is it unfair discrimination for a male pastor to refuse to serve with a female pastor?’ The results were as follow:

• 45% said that it is not unfair discrimination if a male pastor refuses to serve because of his convictions.
• 25% said that it is unfair discrimination if a male pastor is serving in a church that officially ordains women.
• 20% said that it is unfair discrimination, and that it is unacceptable behavior even if it is based on a male pastor’s understanding of Scripture.
• 10% said that it is not unfair discrimination, and that it is okay as long as a male pastor does not stop a female pastor from doing her work.

And finally… what are your thoughts, on the poll itself or its results?

Founded by the forward thinking Mary Lyon (1797-1849), Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts (today known as Mount Holyoke College) was not her first educational venture. Lyon taught for several years along the Massachusetts countryside in smaller, elementary schools (often paid far less than the men in the area for the same amount of work). From 1817 to 1821, she attended Sanderson Academy and later taught there, as well as at the Adams Female Seminary in New Hampshire and Ipswich Female Seminary. Mount Holyoke opened in South Hadley in 1837 with eighty students, and it is Fidelia Fiske (1816-1864) who became its first graduate to enter into international missions.

Fiske was said to be a precocious young girl, reading Cotton Mather’s Magnali Christi Americana and Timothy Dwight’s Theology by age eight. She came to Mount Holyoke in 1839, but her education was interrupted when she contracted typhoid fever. Forty students contracted typhoid fever at the same time and nine died. It was thought that she, as one not known for good health, would be on that list. Her father, sister, and mother helped her pull through, though her father and sister also picked up typhoid fever and died in the process. Her mother, Hannah, did not want her to drift too far away after her near-death experience, so for a short while Fidelia taught at the local schools. Once she had recovered, her mentor and good friend, Mary Lyon, encouraged her to return to school and finish her education. After completing her degree, she was overwhelmingly approved by the trustees to be a full time instructor at Mount Holyoke.

As is often the case, life changes quickly. A missionary on furlough named Justin Perkins wrote a book called Eight Year’s Residence in Persia. Fidelia read it with eagerness. The book described the world of Persia (modern day Iran) and the needs of the people in such detail (including full color artwork) that she wondered if she would be better serving Christ in that world.

Within little time, word came that Perkins was nearing the end of his stay in America and had not located someone to replace Judith Grant, a missionary in Persia who had started a day school for girls, but passed away a few years earlier. Mary Lyon called all the instructors and students of Mount Holyoke together for an emergency meeting, informing them of the need. Those interested were told to drop a note in a box. While Fidelia and others were certainly academically qualified, it was later recalled by Perkins that Fidelia’s note was the only one that said, ‘If I am found worthy, I would like to go.’ The others regaled the missionary with their curriculum vitas, but because Fiske saw it as a spiritual engagement, she became their first and natural choice.

With little time to work, she immediately sent out a letter to her mother asking for her blessing. She also sent out letters to other family members, asking for their opinions. All of them told her that she was not healthy enough to enter into a mission field. Some pointed out that she could be leaving her family for good if she did such a thing. With good intentions, they reminded her that she was not the type of person to go off on adventures (clearly ignoring the fact that her interest seemed to indicate otherwise). There was also the added point, being a single missionary woman in the field was nearly scandalous - a sentiment still living on in some circles today.

Heeding their concerns, Fidelia turned down the offer and tried to move on. The position was offered to another woman, whose family told her the same thing. It was then that Mary Lyon came back to Fidelia and asked her to reconsider. Fidelia asked to sleep on it - something she was not able to do easily. Very early in the morning she knocked on Lyon’s door. She was willing to go to Persia, but on one condition: Lyon had to help her convince her mother. On that snowy winter day, she took a sled ride with Lyon to her mother’s home and spent the weekend discussing the issue. By Sunday evening, her mother gave her blessing.

It was a decision that changed her life. She boarded a ship with Perkins and his family and journeyed off to Oroomiah, arriving in June of 1843. There she made the school of Grant into an effective boarding school modeled after Mount Holyoke. She entered into a hostile culture that found no value in women and saw no reason to educate their daughters. Given such a world, one of the first phrases she learned in their language was ‘give me your daughters.’

Fidelia spent fifteen years in Persia declaring the value of women. She convinced families to let her educate their young daughters instead of abandoning them or selling them into slavery. She became a mother and a teacher to these girls.

By 1858, her struggle with sickness got the better of her and she returned to America. During that time she toured New England, raising awareness of the work still needed to be done in international missions. She returned to teaching at Mount Holyoke for a while and later published several books, including a biography on Mary Lyon. She died in 1864.

Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, Fidelia was encouraged to get a quality education and had her individual gifts nurtured. She did not allow herself (or the girls she ministered to in Iran) to be pigeonholed based solely on their gender. Each of us could serve as a Mary Lyon to someone who needs nurturing. Organizations like CBE and its members call Christians to minister by giftedness, not by gender.

How do you do the same in your local congregation?

For more information on Fidelia Fiske, see Faith Working by Love here.